'It is hot here,' I said, self-conscious under her gaze.
She said, 'It is much hotter in Cali.'
'Really? I thought it was cool there.'
'Very hot. You will not like it.'
'You are from Cali?'
She smiled. 'Venezuela.'
'How long have you been travelling?' I asked.
'Two days. I flew to Bogotá. The bus to Armenia, and now this train. I am going to visit my sister. Why are you going to Cali?'
I had no answer for this. I had no good reason for going to Cali, other than the fact that it was south of Bogotá and on the way to Ecuador. If I told her my ultimate destination I felt she would ask me more unanswerable questions.
I said, 'I have a friend in Cali.'
The lie depressed me. I had no friend in Cali. Apart from some distant relations in Ecuador I did not know a single soul anywhere on this continent. I had been offered the addresses of people, but one of my rules of travel was to avoid looking up my friends' friends. In the past, I had done so reluctantly, and the results had been awkward, not to say disastrous. But travelling alone, a selfish addiction, is very hard to justify or explain.
'That is good,' said the woman. 'You will need a friend in Cali.'
This made my depression complete.
It was too hot to read. I had packed Boswell in my suitcase with my watch and my ring. I finished my soda water and looked at the men washing their trucks in the middle of the Rio Barragan. It was a tropical habit, the washing of motor vehicles in rivers; but this zone was both tropical and temperate. The green hills would not have looked unusual in the Catskills, except for the tall straight palms on their slopes, and the bananas, and that pig. We crossed into lower hills of shaggy green: bananas, chickens, and more pigs - it was impossible to look out of the window without thinking of breakfast.
After forty miles the hills became wilder still, and at sixty the climate had changed utterly. Now the hills were brown and overgrazed, and all the landscape sun-scorched, and no green thing anywhere. The bald hills, stripped of all foliage, were rounded on their slopes and had little wave-like shapes beating across them. It was a brown sea of hills, as if a tide of mud had been agitated and left to dry in plump peaks; this was the moment before they crumbled into cakes and dunes and dust slides. Glimmering beyond them was pastel flatness of diluted green -the cane fields which lie between the two cordilleras. From here to Cali, the cane fields widened, and at level crossings there were cane-cutters standing - there were too many of them to sit down - on the backs of articulated trucks, like convict labour. They had been up before dawn. It was four o'clock, and they were being taken home, through the fields they had cleared.
What towns I had seen, from the forecourts of railway stations, had seemed unprepossessing. There were a few factories at Bugalagrande and dried-out fields of shrivelled corn. Every town's hills had a distinctive shape - Bugalagrande's were great slumping circus tents. At Tulua I saw two churches, one with the dome of Saint Peter's, the other like Rheims; but Tulua was an otherwise dismal-looking place, like the Moslem railway junctions in eastern Turkey, all dust and sun and huts and a mosque or two. There were signs near these Colombian stations, indicating a place or giving a traffic warning, and all included a piece of advertising. The effect could be odd: National Police Institute Drink Coca-Cola; No Passing Smoke Hombre Cigarettes; Drive Slowly Bank of Colombia. After the town of Buga (a grand old station, with waiting rooms lettered First Class and Second Class - but they were both equally empty and derelict), the tracks became perfectly straight; such straight tracks were always an indication that, with no hills ahead, we were moving directly into the heat, across the plains with nothing ahead but a wiggling mirage cast up from the swamp-scalded earth.
The sun was blazing through the net curtains. I could not change my seat, so I walked to the rear of the train and found an open shady door where I sat and smoked my pipe and watched the cane fields pass. Another man had the same idea. We talked awhile. He wore a crumpled hat, a faded shirt; no shoes. He said he was a coffee picker. He worked in Cali, but did not like picking coffee in Cali. The pay was poor and the coffee was not much good either. 'Armenia is where the best coffee comes from,' he said. 'It is the best in the whole of Colombia.' In Armenia the pay was better - the highest prices went for Armenia's coffee.
'How much do you earn in Cali?'
'Eighty pesos.' This was less than three dollars.
'A week? A day? A basket?'
'Eighty a day.'
'Why don't you get paid by the basket?'
'In some places they do. Not in Cali.'
Tsit hard work?'
'It is work,' he said, and smiled. 'I can tell you it is very hot.'
'How much did you make a day last year?'
'Sixty-four pesos.' Two dollars.
'And the year before that?'
'Fifty-six pesos.' A dollar fifty.
I said, 'So you get more every year.'
'But not enough. Do you know what it costs to buy meat, flour, eggs, vegetables?'
'You might get a hundred next year.'
'They get a hundred in Armenia now,' he said. 'Sometimes a hundred and fifty. That is why I went up there. I want to work in Armenia.'
'How many hours do you work?'
'All day.'
'You start early?'
'Oh, yes. We start early, we finish late.'
'I am sorry to ask you so many questions,' I said.
He used a nice Spanish phrase to excuse me. 'I am at your command, sir.'
'How much do you pay for half a kilo of coffee?' I asked.
'If you work on an estate it does not cost much,' he said.
Then I told him what a pound of coffee costs in the United States. At first he did not believe me, then he said, 'But, no matter what you say, we are still very poor in Colombia. Everything is expensive here and it just gets worse.' He shook his head. 'Look, that is Palmira. We will be in Cali soon.'
I had been glad to have my leather jacket in Bogotá and Armenia. Now, in this heat, it seemed absurdly out of place. At Cali I was so hot I inadvertently left it on the train and had to run back and retrieve it. I was walking across the platform when I noticed a porter talking rapidly and angrily to an old man with a sack of oranges. I pretended to tie my shoe-lace, and listened.
'I helped you with that thing,' said the porter. 'The least you can do is give me something.'
'I am not giving you anything. You did not do anything.'
'Five pesos,' said the porter. 'Give it!'
The old man turned away.
The porter, wringing his hands, walked ten steps. But he did not say anything.
The old man turned and showed his teeth. 'You are a son of a whore.'
The porter heard him. He turned. 'You are a whore and your mother was a black whore.' He saw me staring and said, 'Look at that stupid man!'
Cali ('Very dangerous') was so dull that, simply to keep myself occupied one afternoon, I bought a roll of dental floss and carefully flossed my teeth. Nor was I lucky with Cali's hotels; I stayed three nights in the city and each morning checked out of the madhouse I had slept in the night before and set off in search of a new one. I toured the churches and watched long lines of little old ladies waiting to have their confessions heard. What could their sins possibly be? / have had evil thoughts, Father. I inquired into Cali's recreations. 'If I were you I would go up to Armenia,' said a Colombian in my second hotel. 'That is a lovely little town.' I told him I had already been to Armenia and that it had reminded me of the most poverty-stricken parts of India. This was always a conversation-stopper: no matter how poor the Colombian believed himself to be, he felt libelled by any comparison with another poor country.
There were hills to the south and west. On my last day in Cali, I bought a map of the district and plunged into the countryside, keeping to the mule-tracks and by-passing the highest hill, a sort of local Golgotha with three crosses erected on its peak. I hiked throughout the morning and when the sun was directly overhead saw a stream splashing into a gully. I had sandwiches but no water, so I hurried to this stream for a drink. On the far side was a shack, with a goat tethered to one wall. An old man stood near the shack, pitching stones into the stream. He seemed Wordsworthian until his aim grew better and I realized that he was throwing the stones at me. I went no farther. Now the man was mumbling and shouting; he was either a lunatic or had taken me for a tax-collector. I headed towards a different path and eventually found some water.